Emacs isn't constrained by terminal, Tramp doesn't need knowing any "incredibly obscure" command, and since one uses local Emacs there is no input lag to speak of. I feel like you are conflating Emacs and Vi here even though they are not same at all, only in case of Vi you connect via ssh in a terminal and do everything remote side, not in Emacs. I use Tramp to have local Emacs connect to remote docker container, where everything else is in remote side. Even remote language server works in eglot over Tramp.
To be clear, I was only mentioning vi and emacs together because both have incredibly passionate communities that can be quite myopic to the UX deficiencies of their platforms. I have a lot of muscle memory committed to emacs so I still use it a lot, but I can onboard a dozen junior developers onto vscode in the time it takes me to help someone figure out emacs. And to me, the final missing piece that made vscode suitable as a general purpose replacement for emacs was the remote dev plugin.
It's not that out of the way. The previous place I worked, we had to help new hires get their editor set up, because most of them hadn't used Ruby/Rails before and didn't know what they'd need. We had an onboarding doc that helped you get started with Code + Solargraph, RubyMine or Sublime + Solargraph so they'd have features they'd have used in other languages. Apart from that, we'd also have to guide them through getting the editor set up to do things like format on save etc. to ensure the codebase was clean.
